Martinelli’s white elephant hospital opens in July

The Cardiovascular and Thoracic Institute of Panama’s City of Health will receive its first patients on July 12 said the director of the Social Security Fund (CSS), Enrique Lau Cortés during an inspection of the trouble-plagued site on Friday, March 4 to verify progress.

The announcement came 12 years after a previous CSS board had passed a resolution naming the project after the then “visionary” president Ricardo Martinelli.  Later the FCC construction company was investigated for alleged kickbacks.

Lau Cortes  said that the Cardiovascular and Thoracic Institute will have “four operating rooms, the catheterization room, plus two hybrid operating rooms for hemodynamic studies.”

The works in the City of Health were reactivated on November 15, 2021, after the CSS finalized the contract with the Spanish construction company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas and reached a transnational agreement.

The project was started during the Martinelli administration (2009-2014) when  CSS satraps of the president wanted to name the building after him.

The name ‘Ciudad Hospitalaria Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal’, by resolution issued by the board of directors of the Social Security Fund (CSS), is the recognition of those who thought it was a visionary project.

Instead it is known as Martinelli’s White Elephant.